Wicked Julia's Rants and Raves

A phone sex operator talks about her job, candidly.

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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum. - Johm Updike

Thanks be to God that I am what I am

Thursday, June 21, 2012

I read a lot of blogs. I love hearing about what other people have to say on a wide variety of subjects. It renews my sense of hope for the future to read about people promoting change in small, sane, steps. I do admit that I stick to reading blogs written by people who share my views. This morning I read http://leftcoastvoices.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/its-ok-to-be-food-secure-roger-ingalls/#comment-1533. I suggest you do the same. It. Is. Brilliant. Below is the comment I wrote for Left Coast Voices. I cut myself off because I felt that I was writing too much on someone else's blog. At the end, I have added the rest of what I wanted to say.

(Beginning of Comment)

What Cuba has done is incredible. I would love to see something similar happen in the United States, especially in places like East St. Louis or Detroit or a small town like Cairo, IL. All places deeply effected by urban blight. In the U.S., we have CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) but, I think to implement what Cuba has done, we would need to have American farmers move away from the idea of 'profit only' farming.

Here's what I mean; several members of my extended family are farmers with contracts to supply corn, soybeans, pork and beef to industrial food processing companies. Their attitude is that they produce a product and sell it to those companies for income. They have no contact with the people they feed and feel very little connection to the land they farm. It's a job to them, nothing more, and they feel just as trapped as the person shuffling paper in a office, somewhere. Most of them don't even bother to garden for their own household, even though they have more than enough space and experience to do so. They are completely mentally invested in the idea that to make growing crops worthwhile, someone must be handing out a check for the effort.

Yet, CSAs are profitable. I have volunteered on and used several to supply my household needs over the years. A conversation with one about money was an eye-opening experience. The woman earned a profit(!) that is 3 time the average income in America and only worked six to seven months a year. She spent her free time and extra money indulging her love for traveling all over the world. Not a bad way to live. The downside of the CSA system, as it is, is its dependence on volunteer labor. There is a legal loophole that allows CSAs to not hire workers (and pay for labor), instead they use volunteers. Every CSA I have seen takes advantage of that loophole so while the owner/operators often makes a very comfortable profit, they are not required to share that profit with the people working for them. Most of the labor is done by students earning an academic credit or people interested in starting their own CSA someday. This way of procuring labor heavily favors owner/operators. The system grows food but, doesn't create jobs.

I am not sure what the first steps would be, for us as a nation. I am sure that there are people working on this issue who are far more knowledgeable than I am. I do my part as a consumer, buying local and organic whenever possible. I live in an urban community that makes it very easy to do so. What I would like to see happen is city/state/federal sponsored CSAs appear in urban areas with those farmers getting paid for their labor. I would also like to see farmers across the country supplying produce to their local schools, hospitals, prisons, military bases and anywhere else where the government is feeding people on a daily basis.

Cuba is showing us a way to do both.

(On a side note, I apologize to Left Coast Voices for the length of this comment. This is a subject near and dear to my heart and it got away from me. Please feel free to edit this down to a more manageable length.)

(End of Comment)

You might be wondering how the hell this can possibly tie to my job as a PSO. Here's how I do it. I have created a character named Julie/Julia (I have written about this before) who grew up on a CSA run by her family. Therefore Julie/Julia is very knowledgeable about organic farming in the United States and can talk a caller's ear off on the subject, if that is what he wants. If anyone is wondering, yes I am very well read on the subject and have a great deal of 'hands on' experience. This is another way for me to promote local organic farming with a bunch of people who have never heard of the subject or have dismissed it at hippy bullshit.

Because this is not just about food or food security. This is about national security. As a nation, we are too dependent on foreign products, especially foreign oil. Our current system of food production is heavily dependent on petrochemicals and sees no reason to change because we, as Americans, are unaware of that dependence. So they go trudging along; raking up huge profits (partially through taxpayer subsidies), bankrupting actual American farmers with a system of indentured servitude that is appalling, and feeding us crap that is not only nutritionally suspect, it is actually making us sick. Industrialized food productions costs us more than most of us have ever imagined at every level and we just keep paying and paying and paying. At the national level, we dance around the subject, never able to confront it head on because the agribusiness lobbyists group are well funded and very aggressive.

This is where the American people have to step in. We, as a nation, have to promote local organic farming in our communities because our politicians cannot do it for us. They need to see our desire for change before they can really take on big agribusiness. They need our support and we need to do this for our safety and our future. Think about this; if an enemy really cut us off from our oil supply, not only would we not be able to drive, we wouldn't be able to eat. An enemy could, literally, starve the United States into submission by cutting off the flow of foreign oil.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Roughly two weeks ago, I had an unpleasant experience in the Twitterverse and blogged about it here. If you are interested, please read the post titled Not All Masks Are For Carnival. Now, the person who angered me has felt the need to respond with a post on their blog and comments on mine. Mark also felt that it was appropriate to include a link to their site in his comments without asking me first. I removed it not because I felt Mark does not have the right to respond but, because I feel that inserting a link without my permission was, in a word, rude. The author seems to be very hung up on the subject of who is right. Really, how very White Male System. Just what I wanted on my blog about my experiences.

If you are unfamiliar with the phrase, I urge you to read the book Women's Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef. The author explains the mentality of White Male System thinking far more eloquently than I could. The book is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in feminism and I have, over the course of my life, passed out more copies than I care to remember. Surprised that a woman who does what I do for a living is a feminist? It is a problem I wrestle with each and every time I work and part of what I am working out in my blog. It is also the reason I am so brutal with some of the callers. If their fantasies involve more ugly stereotypes than I can stomach at that moment, I tend to let them know it. With both barrels.

What is boils down to is that I really don't care if Mark feels that he is right. I feel that I am right. In my world view, both of us have valid perceptions of the experience we shared. I suspect that in Mark's world view, that is not possible so he has set out to prove that he is right. Okay, go for it. Refrain from putting links on my blog. I did not do so to yours. In fact, I did not make any comments on your blog. Nor do I plan to. The elderly gentlemen who inquired whether I not I charged Mark for the conversation in his comment made it clear to me that I have no desire to. I deal with enough of that attitude when I am working, thank you. Another man passing judgement about something he knows nothing about and thinking that he is cute. Ah, no. There are many words for that bit of bullshit, 'cute' is not what comes to mind. I think that the author of that comment exactly the same as the callers I speak to and I've already shared my feelings about them.

I also found another comment by Bee C rather telling about the attitudes of the people involved. Both Mark and this person feel that a transcript of the conversation was necessary. I admit, the first version of Not All Masks Are For Carnival contained just that. However, after consulting with friends and sleeping on it, I decided that to do so was childish and unnecessary. I felt then as I feel now; my perception of the experience is valid because it is mine. As I stated in my reply to Bee C, writing an unasked for critique and posting it in a public forum does require you to read the fucking material. In the case of a blog, at least solid sampling of the material since most people will not have the time to read the entire thing. I am also not asking the Internet community at large to pass judgement on that experience which is why I chose not to include a transcript or list Masquerade Crew by name. I was blogging about my experiences, not inviting debate concerning the validity of my perceptions. The fact that Bee C chose to interpret my posting that way is ...interesting, to say the least.

I chose to write about my experiences as a PSO to help me process them and to share with others some of the amazingly stupid stereotypes I have smacked myself into because of it. I am not just talking about the callers. Conscientious people ask questions before passing judgement on what I do and what I write about.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

(I wrote this two weeks ago and I decided not to post it because I was ready to end my relationship with the first hosting company. I did not want to be reminded of the few good callers I would be giving up if I did. Since then, my working relationship with the hosting company has evened out.)

He's back, the Swiss Financier is in New York tonight and feeling horny. I am embarrassed to say that I am actually glad to talk to him. In my defense, this week has just been bad. I got suckered into working on my days off and taken advantage of by the Downer. I am really mad at myself for that one. I love to give people second chances because I remember a time (or two) in my life when I acted like a jerk and really wanted a chance to prove that jerk-hood was not my natural state. The Downer's natural state is to be as much of an asshole as s/he can get away with without getting slapped (or possibly shot, stabbed, or set on fire). I looked up the hosting company on a consumer report website once, and trust me when I say that there a lot of former PSOs who hate the Downer with a blinding passion. All but, one of the complaints were about this individual. The one exception was a man with a credit card issue. My guess; he needed to have a serious conversation with his teenage son and how that boy spends his afternoons. It would probably be an eye opening experience for the man.

The Swiss Financier definitively made my evening a hell of a lot better. First of all, talking to him raised my average out of the muck. More importantly, he's fun to talk to and was glad to find me again. It's nice to talk to a caller who is overjoyed to talk to me and doesn't want to plunge into his fantasy right away, unlike the Acolyte and Pantyman. We talked about art, he had recently purchased a cityscape from a modern impressionist I actually know. Not personally but, I have seen a show of the man's work and it is breathtaking. The Swiss Financier tried to explain to me how art collecting is a little bit by gambling but, he was a little bit drunk and kept switching to German. I teased him about it and he told me about the cocktail party he had been forced to attend with graphic descriptions of the other guests. I laughed until I turned blue.

We talked about cuckoldry and his wife's latest boyfriend. Young, handsome, dumb as a box of rocks, and thinks he's going to talk the wife into leaving her husband to support him and his band. The wife is already getting bored with that one and thinking about a lengthy business trip to let him down easy. The Swiss Financier thinks she should just tell pretty boy that it's not going to happen. I understand how disappearing for a bit is a hell of a lot easier and leaves the door open for an occasional hook up later. He conceded my point while we switched to talking about alcohol. American beer is disgusting, in his opinion. I grew up in the Midwest where drinking cheap beer and 'shooting the gravels' is a weekend event so I knew that. He tried to talk about wine with me and teased me, relentlessly, when I admitted that I have no palate for wine. The Swiss Financier is convinced that if I tried enough good wine, I would develop a taste for it. He's probably right and I told him about my experiences with cheese tasting. I have hated cheese for years until I went to a cheese tasting sponsored by the local Whole Foods Grocery. I stumbled into it while shopping, actually, and got coaxed into trying several by enthusiastic cheese lovers who had taken over the event from the staff.

The Swiss Financier is convinced that I would make the perfect mistress for a wealthy man with cosmopolitan taste. He advises me to sign up on one or more of those Meet The Sugar Daddy Of Your Dreams sites and stop wasting my time and talent. He assures me that he will miss talking to me when I do but, tells me that I deserve better than the penny ante shit I am doing on the phone sex line. I sigh as I listen to him imagine the wonderful life I could enjoy as a pampered mistress kept by a generous man. We are drifting into his cuckoldry fantasy and I let him. It is far easier than letting him pursue the idea of me being a kept woman and expecting feedback from. I am honestly not sure that the Swiss Financier is thinking of himself as the Sugar Daddy in question though I suspect that he is. This has happened to me before. The caller starts giving me, as my character, advice and gets distracted as he warms to the idea.

The first time was with Mr. Gross and Boring, who really wanted me to switch to another phone sex service that allows video to be exchanged between members. Since I won't advertise the hosting services I actually use, I am sure as hell not going to give the name of the one he suggested. Gross and Boring is obsessed with whether or not phone sex is real and I have taken a number of pot shots at his belief system over the months I have known him. If he is not going to acknowledge that even the women he can see don't have any personal interest in his sorry ass fantasy, he's not going to listen to me. This "do what I think you should because it would be good for me," crap is actually very common. It used to bother me because it is a variation of a Contact Me fantasy but. the trainers have told me that it is very common and actually a sign of a talented PSO. The more a caller falls for you and wants to meet, the more he has bought into your persona.

The Swiss Financier is an astute man and senses my emotional withdrawal from the conversation almost immediately He asks me what is wrong. I laugh and explain that I don't think I would be a very good mistress because I like running my own life too much. Instead of arguing with me, as most callers would, he chuckles and agrees. He calls me something in German Fraulein that I can't spell and explains that it means strong-willed. He tells me to seek a career that puts me in contact with wealthy men who would appreciate my temperament.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Well, that night was an interesting evening. One caller I spoke to had an original idea about how phone sex works. To be fair, it was more of an variation on the same tired bullshit I hear every time I work. This particular caller just managed to take it one step further than I had ever heard before. I was signed into the second hosting company I work for and not having a great evening. On the first hosting company lines, the late night callers tend to be pretty mellow. They have long, elaborate fantasies they are inclined to actually listen to. Many of them just want to talk. The exact opposite is true at the second company. Late night callers on that line tend to be more impatient, more aggressive, more inclined to interrupt to speed the fantasy along to where they want to be as quickly as possible. I started out strong that evening but, the last three calls tanked my average.

The first bad call was from a perv claiming to be a college student. He wanted to call to move faster under the argument that he had already wasted several minutes with another PSO, talking about horses. For the record, saying this is not a good way to get an experienced PSO to like you. Don't tell me that you just tanked another's PSO's average because you were too impatient to tell her what you wanted and then moved on to me. If you are so naive that you do not understand that phone sex is not a dating service and the women who work the lines are there for the money (and willing to work with you to give you the fantasy you want as long as you give them the time they need), perhaps you shouldn't be calling.

One of the other bad callers is the type I hate the most because he was fucking with me and we both know there very little I could do about it. He was experienced enough to know that if he doesn't play fair long enough for me to get a decent call out of him, I will find a way to ditch him the next time he calls. These types of callers are most common on the TVTS lines and are usually straight men pretending to be transsexual. They are looking for a transsexual PSO who is living her life in a way that mirrors their fantasies about transsexual women. I've talked before about this fetish. It is still a subject I am struggling to understand.

The caller who managed to annoy me the most was a young man also calling for a transsexual. He knew that I was pretending to be one and spoke about that subterfuge with the usual amount of contempt callers have when the illusion is pierced. As if they are somehow being cheated by the experience even though he had enjoyed the fantasy up until that point. He was the one who chose to confront the issue while asking me a question. I did not bring it up first, as I have done with annoying callers in the past. Here's were things really got weird. He accused me of faking 'it' and, before I could say anything else, told me how he thought I was faking it.

This rather amazingly stupid young man thought that the only way I could possibly sound as sexy as I do is because...wait, this is the best part...I must be having sex with someone while I am speaking to him. He believed that I am gay and having sex with my girlfriend while speaking to him so I could make myself sound the way I naturally sound. Even writing that statement makes me pause with wonderment at how modern civilization shields the obtuse from certain death. Are you kidding me? You really think that I am actually having sex with another person while speaking to you? Holy. Shit. How dumb do they get?

Let me make this perfectly clear, again, I do not masturbate while I am working. I don't have to be stimulating myself to sound the way I chose to. Nor is it a job requirement for the hosting company. Really, how the hell would they enforce that one if it was a rule? I work from home, in another state from both hosting companies and the staffing company. Anyway, I thank my lucky stars it is not a requirement, because the vast majority of callers bore me silly and a small percentage of them make me want to become a very specialized serial killer. In other words, if I were in the mood, those idiots would kill it as soon as they started speaking. The very few I actually enjoy speaking to are no more exciting than the random stranger you meet in public and engage in some unfocused flirting with before moving on with your day. Ever try having sex when you are bored with your partner? Or angry? I can't do either and never have. I just don't understand the appeal of what people call 'angry sex'. Ever try to have sex with someone you think is disgusting and doesn't deserve to breath the same air you do? I shudder to think of it and there are a number of callers I put in that category.

The excitement for me comes from the storytelling. Phone sex is like a verbal Improv theater in Hell. I have one shot to grab my audience and if I fail, my ability to survive is at risk. Remember, I am not talking to pervs because I get off on the experience. I am talking to pervs for a living and because there is no trust fund waiting for me someday. Until the economy picks up, this is pretty much it for the job market where I live. For the time being my job is to craft an erotic story, on the spot, tailored for the caller's fantasy and to pretend to enthusiastically participate no matter how I feel about his fantasy's content. And I manage to do it, successfully, mind you, multiple times a day.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

I know I have been singing the praises of the new hosing company I work for. I am not planning to stop anytime in the near future. There are a few worms in the apples, though. There is a guy who is a Dom into tickling and prefers that the women he tickles have really big, sweaty feet. I have already spoken to him twice and, as far as I am concerned, I am done. I suspect that like a few other callers from the first hosting company, his fantasy doesn't change or evolve in any way. Something that I find excruciatingly boring. In fact, that is the really unfortunate truth about a lot of regular callers. Their fantasies are always exactly the same. These men have literally conditioned themselves through regular masturbation to only get turned on by a handful of often repeated phrases and don't really or can't enjoy onanism without hearing those words. Isn't that a frightening concept?

There are a couple of other repeat callers on the new hosting company's line who are already wearing my patience thin. One is called the Make-up Man. Ultimately, what he wants is to fall asleep to the sound of a woman speaking to him. The details he wants for his fantasy are very limited in range, so is his feedback but, that doesn't mean I get to be lazy about it. Just sound effects will not work with this caller. I made that mistake once and he hung up on me. I discovered that the key with him is to slow the fuck down and describe my character's appearance and actions in irksome detail. Most other callers would be telling me to hurry up or just hang up at me at the speed he likes. I think that he is a very lonely man and misses the sound of a woman's voice late at night.

And then there is the Twerp. A caller who says he is 18 but, I suspect he is lying and is slightly older. Most very young callers are easily overwhelmed, verbally, and can be lead through just about any fantasy a PSO chooses. I tend to stay really Vanilla with these callers because they tend to prefer really Vanilla fantasies. There have been notable exceptions. I spoke with a very young caller who is well on his way to becoming a sadistic Dom. I had a great time talking to this kid because he is into the same goth shit I still love. It was very obvious that he was a kid. I controlled the fantasy completely and when he tried to direct it toward subjects I find distasteful, like incest, I shut him down. Hard. I explained that it was the power dynamic of incest he enjoyed and if he was really looking for the cute, little psychotic partner of his dreams, he's going to have to set that taboo aside. I described incest as constant, sexual bullying where the victim is not safe in her own home. Remember, this kid thinks that we are the same age so I have to explain the whole concept in a way that he can understand. I ask him if what I just described is an experience he would enjoy and he admits he would not. I go onto explain that most of the girls I know who are into goth have had to endure this kind of bullying and it is not going to be part of a sexual fantasy that turns them on. I know I oversimplified this one, just bear with me. I asked him how much porn he consumes and, bloody hell, it is an epic amount. Several hours a night and he admits that he prefers written sadomasochism and taboo over visual images. I suspected that from talking to him. I didn't advise him to lay off the porn. If I had, he most likely would have hung up on me. Porn, and phone sex are the only outlets this kid had for a phenomenal amount of rage. More on him some other time.

Let's talk about the Twerp. Not as young as says he is but, still very young. I am guessing very early twenties and lacking basic socialization skills. I think this kid is very smart and used to talking circles around his peers. He just hasn't come to the realization that there are people smarter than he is who share his interests and have been playing with those concepts longer than he has been alive. I suspect he also is a closeted gay submissive. That doesn't mean he is gay. It means his sexual fantasies revolve around the concept of being forced to suck cock. He just doesn't want to admit that. Instead, he sets up a scenario for one of the dumbest sexual fantasies I have ever heard and then won't stop interrupting me to try to lead me to what he really wants to hear me talk about but, is too shy to admit.

What is the fantasy? A group of teenage girls hire a professional Domme to teach a group of teenage boys a lesson. It seems those boys have been assholes to the girls for several months, talking endlessly about how much they enjoy watching women fuck each other and harassing the girls to 'put on a show for them'. Already, I have outdone the Twerp in description with two bloody sentences. The girls tell the boys to meet them at the requisite spooky, haunted mansion where the Domme is waiting. Shades of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Scoobie Doo are now leaking into his fantasy and I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing at him. The Domme overpowers the boys by methods unknown and now he asks me what I would do if I were that Domme. I start talking and he interrupts. He doesn't like any story build up so I can't explain how I would keep them physically isolated from each other, naked, in darkened cells, listening to what they think is people being tortured but, is really just a recording being played to confuse and frighten them. No, the Twerp likes to jump forward. But, what would I do to them, he asks over and over again as he tries to hurry me along before finally getting so frustrated he hangs up.

I have said it before and I'll say it again. I hate fantasies that don't make sense. I am not just talking about sexual fantasies, either. I am a voracious reader and if an author constructs a fantasy world with an unworkable culture at the heart of it, that's it. I'm done. I set the book aside and find something else to read. That's why I love writers with a solid back round in history and think most fantasy published today is garbage. There are a couple of really bad books I hang onto because of Sheri S. Tepper, an author I have a love/hate relationship with. One of the finest fantasy novels I have read, right up there with Barbara Hambly's Dragonsbane, was written by Tepper. Another one of her novels I consider one of the worst books ever published. She comes up with fascinating concepts but, often sets them in unworkable societies. The small collection of awful books I hang onto are the same. That was this kid is offering me, an unworkable scenario that he is too impatient to let me flesh out into a workable one because he really only wants to hear about boys being forced to suck each other's cocks.

Sigh, a potentially great fantasy and an asshole caller with no respect for the art of storytelling.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Most people realize that I have a tendency to be on Twitter while I am working. The people I regularly communicate with understand that when I say "I am on a call", it means I cannot pay attention to what is going on in the Twitterverse because I am concentrating on talking to a perv. You know, my job. The thing I do even though I don't like it because I need money to survive. My friends understand and grant me the courtesy of patience. @Hallpass69 seemed to have felt otherwise. He called me an egg. Which is true, I have no picture in the Twitterverse so I am represented by an egg. There are safety reasons for this @Hallpass69 may have been unaware of and care less about if he was aware. He got offended by something I said, informed me that he was going to risk the loss of his 6K followers to destroy me and then blocked and unfollowed me when I let him know I was on a call and would have to speak with him later.

Thank god. I admit that I joined Twitter to follow a few celebrities and learn more about the indie publishing market. I didn't expect to enjoy it but, I do. Al Franken, a man I hugely respect and admire, follows me. I know it is his staff but, I am still tickled pink by that one. I have had an enormous amount of fun flirting and exchanging snarky comments with a number of different people. Some I will mention in a moment. Some, out of respect for their privacy, I will not. I don't entirely understand Twitter culture but, I already have a few rules. If you follow me, I will follow you but, only if you have something in your bio. Blank bios are a little creepy, even to a woman who has to hide her identity for her safety. To date, I have only blocked one person because, well I am not exactly sure what she was trying to accomplish but, she sent me several direct messages warning me 'people were talking bad about you' but offered no further information. Unfortunately, she chose to do this on one of the days I was not logged into Twitter. Hmm ...that's strange, was my first response when I saw her messages. Goodbye and blocked was the second. I didn't even block the idiot who suggested I would get more 'business' if I post pictures of myself. He only follows porn actresses and porn sites. Guess he didn't read my blog, either. By the way, I have not blocked and unfollowed that woman I was bitching about in my last entry, either. I just have no intentions of ever communicating with her directly, again. I still enjoy her links and, bloody hell, there have been a lot of them, lately.

Why am I glad @Hallpass69 is gone? Unlike the majority of his followers, I didn't solicit him for a follow. He just appeared one day and I followed him back to be polite. So, he has known I am an egg for quite awhile now. I also never asked him to help me gain more followers, which seems to be the vast majority of what he does on Twitter; collect followers and help others do the same. He's not a writer, a politician, or pundit; his jokes are no where near as funny as @treywafer or @DanKCharnley. He not a celebrity I am curious about or enjoy ogling. I had been thinking about dropping him for days. I just didn't feel like being rude. Luckily, he did it for me.

See, the other thing that I noticed about @Hallpass69 is that he is one arrogant motherfucker. It seems that only certain people are allowed to actually to communicate with him. All others, primarily, all females are allowed to flirt with him and sing his praises, only. They are not allowed to snark. Sexism? On Twitter? Say it ain't so, Joe! I believe he felt I snarked out of turn to him and his equally unwelcome buddy, @BlackGodSon, and the two decided they needed to put me in my place. When I failed to respond immediately with the appropriate words of contrition because I was WORKING, I got dropped. Can you hear my heart shattering into a million little pieces? Hmm, neither can I.

Gentlemen, I don't put up with that shit with the callers who are paying for it. Thank you for taking yourselves out of my Twitterverse for me.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

***Since the vast majority of my new visitors are not bothering to read anything on my blog other than this one post, I have decided that the best way to get you to read my response is to do this.

Oh, by the way, your actions are proving my point. In fact, your actions are carving my point into granite.***

Roughly two weeks ago, I had an unpleasant experience in the Twitterverse and blogged about it here. If you are interested, please read the post titled Not All Masks Are For Carnival. Now, the person who angered me has felt the need to respond with a post on their blog and comments on mine. Mark also felt that it was appropriate to include a link to their site in his comments without asking me first. I removed it not because I felt Mark does not have the right to respond but, because I feel that inserting a link without my permission was, in a word, rude. The author seems to be very hung up on the subject of who is right. Really, how very White Male System. Just what I wanted on my blog about my experiences.

If you are unfamiliar with the phrase, I urge you to read the book Women's Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef. The author explains the mentality of White Male System thinking far more eloquently than I could. The book is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in feminism and I have, over the course of my life, passed out more copies than I care to remember. Surprised that a woman who does what I do for a living is a feminist? It is a problem I wrestle with each and every time I work and part of what I am working out in my blog. It is also the reason I am so brutal with some of the callers. If their fantasies involve more ugly stereotypes than I can stomach at that moment, I tend to let them know it. With both barrels.

What is boils down to is that I really don't care if Mark feels that he is right. I feel that I am right. In my world view, both of us have valid perceptions of the experience we shared. I suspect that in Mark's world view, that is not possible so he has set out to prove that he is right. Okay, go for it. Refrain from putting links on my blog. I did not do so to yours. In fact, I did not make any comments on your blog. Nor do I plan to. The elderly gentlemen who inquired whether I not I charged Mark for the conversation in his comment made it clear to me that I have no desire to. I deal with enough of that attitude when I am working, thank you. Another man passing judgement about something he knows nothing about and thinking that he is cute. Ah, no. There are many words for that bit of bullshit, 'cute' is not what comes to mind. I think that the author of that comment exactly the same as the callers I speak to and I've already shared my feelings about them.

I also found another comment by Bee C rather telling about the attitudes of the people involved. Both Mark and this person feel that a transcript of the conversation was necessary. I admit, the first version of Not All Masks Are For Carnival contained just that. However, after consulting with friends and sleeping on it, I decided that to do so was childish and unnecessary. I felt then as I feel now; my perception of the experience is valid because it is mine. As I stated in my reply to Bee C, writing an unasked for critique and posting it in a public forum does require you to read the fucking material. In the case of a blog, at least solid sampling of the material since most people will not have the time to read the entire thing. I am also not asking the Internet community at large to pass judgement on that experience which is why I chose not to include a transcript or list Masquerade Crew by name. I was blogging about my experiences, not inviting debate concerning the validity of my perceptions. The fact that Bee C chose to interpret my posting that way is ...interesting, to say the least.

I chose to write about my experiences as a PSO to help me process them and to share with others some of the amazingly stupid stereotypes I have smacked myself into because of it. I am not just talking about the callers. Conscientious people ask questions before passing judgement on what I do and what I write about.

And then there is the rest of the world.

***And here is the original post***

Something very unsettling happened to me the other day. I am on Twitter (@Wickedjulia if you would care to say hello) and I have noticed that the vast majority of what goes on at that site is Shameless Self Promotion. Celebrities promote the movies and television shows they are involved in, authors promote their books and other writing projects, politicians abound, and everyone seems to promote their favorite charities and causes. For an information junkie like me, it is Sin City. I joined Twitter after reading an article on indie publishing that encourages writers to promote their own works and, bloody hell, that article was right. So I started taking baby steps in promoting my blog.

Nothing big, mind you. I have been simply tweeting to my followers that there is a new entry (when there is one) and asking them to read it. No phony reviews, no teaser sentences, just 'read my blog'. One of the things that I find both amusing and annoying is how many people promote their own work with a "I'll follow you if you follow me" strategy. At a certain level, it makes sense and is fair when they actually follow through on that. Most do, temporarily; they follow for a bit and then disappear, so while one is essentially promoting the other by reading and possibly retweeting to their own followers any witticisms they find amusing, the other is doing nothing. Which seems to be the culture of Twitter.

I decided to be a little more aggressive with my own Shameless Self Promotion. After all, I have just as much right as anyone else, to try to showcase my writing. And I want feedback, goddammit. I want constructive criticism, o' friends of mine who read my blog and have nothing put in a comment but, will discuss the subject in person. You know who you are. No brownies for you until I get more comments. (Like I'm actually going to follow through on that but, hey, it sounds like a credible threat.) So when one of the 'people' I follow tweeted a promise to 'read yours if you read mine', I, jokingly, responded that I had been reading theirs and asked them if they had taken a look at mine. I wasn't really expecting a response through Twitter.

Less than two minutes later, I got a fucking critique I didn't ask for through a social media forum. The woman assumed that my lack of graphics was a conscious choice (it's not) and proclaimed the subject matter to not be her cup of tea. At the end of that two sentence critique, she added that she would retweet my blog to her followers. At this point, I am in shock, as I often am when someone I do not know is unconscionably rude to me. Giving an unasked for criticism of my blog on Twitter struck me as more than a little trashy and, by the amount of time that had passed, I knew damn well that she had not read anything. Wait, it gets better. A second later, a mass tweet appears with my description of my blog pasted in it and an invitation to her followers to read if they are into that sort of thing. Have you ever heard the phrase 'damning with faint praise'?

I sat there for a moment, rendered utterly speechless by the crude and blatant dismissal I have just received before I take several deep breaths and draft a civil response. I state that I find her attitude unfortunate (while thinking it is revoltingly classist and narrow-minded) and add that I enjoy reading about the lives of other people a great deal. She lets me know that she doesn't enjoy reading things with an overtly erotic theme. My thought in response is; Lady, have you actually read some of the romance stories you peddle on your site? I have used a few of them as inspiration for work for the purpose of talking to pervs.

However, I am still struggling with desire to be polite so I advise her to read the first entry where I, rather tongue-in-cheek, explain the purpose of my blog without any explicit sexual descriptions. I do not point out that the last two entries also lack anything sexually explicit. She would know that if she had actually bothered to read instead of just glance around when she went to my site. Which she, oh so obviously, didn't out of the assumption that I write porn and her eyeballs would melt if she were exposed to that subject matter. My very first entry makes it quite clear that I am not advertising my services as a PSO, I am talking about my experiences in an industry that cloaks itself in fantasy to promote its services. There are fake blogs out there, written to advertise the services of independent PSOs and, they are porn. I refer to them as fucktress sites because the first one I saw started with the sentence "I am a 52 year old professional fucktress and I love..." and we can stop there. You get the idea.

The truth is, I don't like the overtly explicit stuff either. I have to listen to callers fabricate their fascinating, (and plagiarized) sexual histories in that language when I am working and after that, I am done. I am a good enough PSO to not have to talk about my characters with that kind of language and most callers actually enjoy innuendo over Extreme Slut Mode. In fact, I was speaking with one of the trainers last night about a schedule adjustment and she brought up the frustration she feels when new PSOs engage in that behavior. The problem with that technique is that not only does it guarantee short calls for the PSO using it, Extreme Slut Mode also conditions the callers to expect that sort of over the top, graphic porn storytelling right at the beginning of a call. If the callers run into a PSO who takes the time to tailor a fantasy just for them or entertains them by showing her knowledge in another subject they are passionate about, pervs conditioned by PSOs who use Extreme Slut Mode get frustrated and verbally abusive. They have been trained to expect to 'get happy' (as one friend describes it) within a couple of minutes by neophyte PSOs and they like it because it saves them money. Whining about the cost of phone sex is a really common way for pervs to encourage a PSO to 'get to the good part' faster. Another one is telling the PSO that they just got cut off from the other PSO they had been talking to and she's not available and he's so close and could the PSO he is now speaking to just help him out....Yeah, I fell for that one. Once. At the beginning, when I was still thinking about being a PSO as similar to customer service. I learned very quickly that it is not.

See what I did there? I described a facet of the industry while discussing another subject to, hopefully, illustrate my point. I admit I do that a lot. The woman I have been tweeting with informs me that she has read my first entry (liar) and basically demands that I point her to the one non-existent post that discusses the industry without anything that might scorch her delicate soul. I try to explain that the industry doesn't work that way, its not like anyone emailed me a manual titled How We Lie To Callers 101. I had to figure this out on my own, for the most part, and am talking about it here. And how frustrating it is, and silly, and stupid.... Alas, Twitter is not conducive to lengthy explanations and she loses patience or decides that she has proven her point about the content of my blog and stops communicating with me.

The last thing I sent her was a direct message because, unlike some, I feel that it is inappropriate to point out a person's less than stellar behavior in public. I tell her that I found her snap judgement of me disappointing and hurtful. I do not mention, in this last tweet, how insulted I am. I assume (and perhaps I shouldn't) that she is smart enough to get that. I have been in a position when I was required to pass judgement on another's artistic output. I was a sculptor before an injury forced me to relegate my passion to a hobby. I once took a class taught by a famous bronze sculptor who insisted that I help with project reviews because I was the only other working artist in a room full of students. I remember the painful diplomacy I used when dealing with those young artists. I had no desire to insult them or the subject they were trying to communicate through their work. I wanted to provide those artists with an honest critique that would help them develop their skills. At the same time, I wanted to let the 'easy A' students know that I was on to their tricks and they were no longer in high school. Art, in any media, is bloody hard work and no one has a right to dismiss that effort without even looking at it.

In other words, Madam, not only have you failed as a promoter of art in the form of writing, you have failed as a human being.